Photographers | >Re-PHOTO

AIG fails again

Stephen Mallon, a New York industrial photographer took some remarkable pictures of the recovery of the US Airways Flight 1549 from the Hudson River for the crane company that lifted it out of the water. It was a great opportunity and he got full co-operation from everyone involved and took 5000 images, which his client was happy to allow him to publish non-commercially on his blog or anywhere else.

On The Online Photographer you can read as I did a story with many long comments about the letter he received from one of the largest rercent business failures, AIG, who apparently have used some of the massive support they are getting from the US taxpayers to get their lawyers to write a letter forcing Mallon to take the pictures off-line.

You can see some posts about this by Mallon on his web site, and the hole were they were is currently filled by a short notice about their removal. Elsewhere on the web you can see many sites with comments about this fine set of pictures, and at the moment there are still some of them on line so you can see it was indeed a pretty remarkable set of work.

On Eric Lunsford‘s blog there are two large images, one of the actual plane body being lifted. This is also on Stellazine, Stella Kramer‘s blog. It’s worth reading what she says, both about this as an attack on free speech and on the pictures themselves: “Stephen Mallons photos are a thing of beauty, and show not only the fragility of such large machines, but the truly heroic work done by those who pulled it out of the icy Hudson.” She is after all a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo editor who has worked with publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and People magazine.

Doobybrain has another six images, and on PDN, who have also covered the story, you can still see the picture they published as their picture of the day in February. I suspect that the lawyers might well try to get some of these removed also, so don’t wait too long before looking at them. I think all of these sites are based in the USA, and it might be good to see as many of his pictures as possible posted on sites in other countries.

It isn’t at all clear what AIG are trying to do, and why they are using their immense legal clout to try and hide this fine work. But I think all of us involved in photography need to speak up and oppose them.

Bohemian Musings

One photo blog I don’t think I’ve come across before is ‘Thoughts of a Bohmenian‘ which describes itself as ‘Another Photo Industry blog‘. What led me there was a Twitter post by the writer of a blog I do occasionally read, ‘A Photo Editor‘.

In case you are wondering about the title, Paul Melcher‘s title for his blog came from hearing the comment about photography “This business has too many Surveyors and not enough Bohemians” and deciding to do his bit to redress the balance.He certainly has a nice turn of phrase (if his speed-spelling isn’t up to scratch) in his post ‘Please, save photography‘

Like me he saw the pictures on Magnum in Motion shot from TV by Alex Majoli and was apalled that Getty Images were rewarding him with a $20,000 grant, but I didn’t think to say “Henri Cartier Bresson must be having a tsunami in his grave as I can assure you, that was NOT the reason he created Magnum. Not for that kind of nombrilistic, uber self-absorded, hyper refflective intello photography.”

Photographing a TV isn’t of course a new thing. Last November I rested my feet during a tiring walk around Paris in front of a screen for another Magnum photographers work, Harry Gruyaerts TV Shots, on show in the Passage du Desir gallery space, and found myself thinking “that I would have found it much more interesting if Gruyeart had gone out and taken his camera with him” rather than sitting home and wasting colour film on a malfunctioning TV.

One photographer who did it back in the ’70s to some effect was Paul Trevor, who while working with ‘Exit‘ on their great documentary project, Survival Programmes, turned around and photographed the very different world that came to him through the TV as ‘A Love Story‘.

And of course, Gruyaert and Majoli do both go out and take pictures. Don’t waste time on Peace TV but do watch Requiem in Samba, also on the Magnum site.

Melcher’s comments came after reading about the ‘Save Photography‘ campaign organised by the French photographic organisations the Union des Photographes Créateurs, FreeLens and the SAIF ( Socièté des auteurs des arts visuels et de l’image fixe.) Their concerns are largely about the falling rates, microstock, orphaned images and so on, as well as some specifically French worries about the legal status of photographs, and as he comments, in typical French style they don’t suggest any solutions but just ask the government to do something about it.

So Melcher’s suggestion is that they should doing something about the quality of photography and get down to saving photography not just by asking the French government to do something but to stop people promoting what he calls “salon photography.”

Paul Graham wins

I wrote my thoughts about the four contestants for the Deutsche Börse photography prize at the London Photographers Gallery when the show opened. You can read them here.

I’ve seen it again since then. But I wouldn’t want to change a word.

Here’s a recent interview with Paul Graham on PDN in which he says some sensible things, particularly about digital and film still having all the important challenges in photography the same, as well as about documentary – with a nice little quote from Walker Evans.

As he said, it was about time the prize went to a UK photographer – even to one who has moved to New York.

More on Pirkle: Plagiarism & Truth

The question of what is and isn’t plagiarism has been aired considerably in recent months, particularly over the use made by Shepard Fairey in his posters of Obama. There’s also a link to Pirkle Jones, whose recent death was the subject of my previous post.

As Mark Vallen pointed out in his article Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey in December 2007, Fairey took an image of an anonymous Black Panther from Jones and Ruth–Marion Baruch‘s 1960 essay on the Black Panthers, degraded it both tonally and by the addition of a couple of inappropriate graphics and made it into ‘his’ street poster. As Vallen puts it:

“Pirkle Jones gave us a compassionate image that served the cause of African-American dignity and liberation, while Fairey gave us a stolen and regurgitated image stripped of all historical meaning and refashioned to serve only one purpose – the advancement of Faireys career.“

For Jones, taking a photograph was a political act (and we often forget that his mentor Ansel Adams was very much involved in a part of the environmental movement – as well as his more clearly political work on the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans at Manzanar.)

Funnily enough, the first time I recall meeting the unforgettable name of Pirkle Jones was in an essay by a student in which she pointed out a remarkable similarity between one of his images and an earlier picture by another photographer – I think Lewis Hine – showing a worker weilding a hammer. I think this was however not plagiarism but simply two photographers coming to a very similar solution when faced by the same subject matter. It’s something that happens fairly regularly in photography.

Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch’s work also became controversial in another way in 1964, when they exhibited a joint project on the sad decline of the northern Californian town of Walnut Grove. As you can read on Howie’s Home Page, things appear to have been not quite what they seemed.

In fact the truth about Walnut Grove is more complex than this article suggests. You can find out more about it on various web sites including Wikipedia, a history page from the local Chamber of Commerce and various sites giving local statistics such as City-data. It is interesting to see that the population there now is more or less exactly the same as it was in 1961, though of course its composition may well be very different. Another article on Jones and Baruch describes it as “a small, racially diverse community that was displaced by a freeway.”

The site about the film of his life, Seven Decades Photographed, as well as the pictures of Walnut Grove linked above, also has pictures on the other pages, for example the ‘Press’ page has pictures of the Black Panthers. There is also a trailer for the film, but since this is a 712Mb Quicktime file very few will have the bandwidth to download it!

Pirkle Jones (1914 – 2009)

The New York Times has a nice obituary of Pirkle Jones who died on March 15, at the age of 95. From 1947-53 he worked as assistant to Ansel Adams, printing his work.

His best known photographs were from a 1956 collaboration with Dorothea Lange The Death of a Valley, which filled a whole issue of Aperture in 1960, and in 1968 after his wife, the Berlin-born photographer Ruth-Marian Boruch (1922-97) became a friend of Eldridge Cleaver’s wife, the two of them photographed the Black Panthers in California. Their pictures of this controversial group drew crowds to the gallery when shown later that year at a San Francisco museum.

As well as the slide show on the NYT and the Black Panther pictures by Jones and Baruch, you can see 10 pictures including some Adamesque landscapes at Joseph Bellows Gallery, a small selection on Artnet and 22 pictures at SFMoMA.

Prague Poet Remembered

I’ve long been a fan of Josef Sudek – and my copy of the first edition of the monograph on him published in the West in 1978, two years after his death, edited by Sonja Bullaty shows considerable signs of use. Bullaty, a photographer who shared some of his lyrical approach, had been held in Nazi concentration camps (including Auschwitz) before managing to escape from a death march and return to Prague as the war was ending. There she found none of her family had survived. She became Sudek’s apprentice until she was able to leave for New York in 1947.

Sudek’s images in the book were finely printed in gravure, and have a quality that often very much echoes the originals. His work very much showed a different sensibility and an alternative photographic printmaking syntax to the bravura zone-based silver prints of American photographers such as Ansel Adams or the glossy bromides of photojournalism. Complex, sometimes brooding, and always with feeling, whether on matte silver or pigment his prints had an interest in surface and depth. It was work in a different register to the prevailing US hegemony.

Later I bought a few more books of his work, and around 1980 organised a small gallery display of Czech photography that included at least one of his prints along with these. I’ve had another gravure of one of his images hanging on my front room wall for many years. And of course I wrote about the man and his work for About Photography.

So I was pleased to see a mention on The Online Photographer (though I think to call him “one of the fathers of 20th-century photography in the Czech nation” belittles a man who was truly one of the greats of 20th century photography full stop) directing me to a note marking the anniversary of his birth on March 17, 1896 at the Disability Studies site of Temple University.

Sudek fought in Italy in the First World War, losing his right arm, and it was this very disability that brought him into photography, as he was given a camera while convalescing from the amputation, and his disability pension allowed him to study photography. The site also links to an extensive gallery of his work and you can also see some at Iphoto Central and Luminous Lint.

One aspect of his work that I developed a particular interest in was his use of panoramic photography – something indeed that led me to buy and use a number of panoramic cameras. The internet doesn’t lend itself too well to the format and not many of his (or mine) appear to be on line.

DLR at Bow Creek, © 1992 Peter Marshall
Definitely not Sudek, but one of my panoramas – some others are on the Urban Landscape web site.
Right Click in sensible browsers and select ‘View image’ to see the picture larger.

One site that has a few (it is poorly written – scroll far to the right to find images) compares some of Sudek’s Praha Panoramaticka images with 1992 images at the same locations by Peter Sramek. Although it is sometimes interesting to see the differences time has made, Sudek’s work has a quality that sets it at a quite different level to the later work.

Harry Benson at the Palace

On the Pop Photo‘s State of the Art blog you can see a picture of Glasgow’s most famous photographer Harry Benson getting his CBE from Princess Anne today. Unfortunately the link they give to Vanity Fair for more simply gets me an invitation to subscribe, but given the quality of the image on State of the Art I’m not too sorry.

You can however see a video interview with the man himself on Live Books, which also contains quite a few of his more famous images. I wrote about Benson last August after seeing his show at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

Portraits? And One Law For All

Someone asked me yesterday evening if I took portraits. I found it a difficult question, though I do often take pictures of people. And some I think aren’t bad. But I rarely if ever have the luxury of being able to work with someone – at least for more than a few seconds, or to direct them or light them carefully in the way that traditional portrait photographers might.

It is of course a matter of choice. Although I can appreciate – for example – the portraits by great masters of the art such as Bill Brandt, the kind of deliberate and planned approach in much of his best work just isn’t my style. Most people probably know the story of the oil lamp in a picture taken for ‘Picture Post’ of a sea-captain in Liverpool; when the editor commented how fortunate he was to have found the man had such a lamp in his room, Brandt replied that he had taken it with him from London for the picture. And when he arranged to meet Frances Bacon at a particular time in the early evening on Primrose Hill, there seems little doubt that the picture he made – one of his finest – was already more or less present in his mind.

Then there are the more formal portraitists who I don’t find particularly of interest – except for some rare moments. People such as Karsh, Arnold Newman and others, whose work I can admire for its technical competence but with a few exceptions leaves me cold. Somehow I don’t think photography is really suited to this kind of formal portraiture, which suffers greatly from inviting itself to be compared with portrait painting.

Photography is much more concerned with capturing the fleeting moment, the look or gesture that perhaps gives an insight into the person. Of course there are great photographs of people that do this, and even some taken on large-format cameras. Paul Strand was one of the masters of this, in so many of his images. You can read an interesting description of his taking a portrait of Katie Morag Morrison in South Uist by John Morrison on the Scotland site, and her picture is one of the 32 by Strand on the Fine Art Photography Masters site (she is the 27th picture in the album for the impatient – but why deny yourself the pleasure of looking through the others before and after. ) Others have decribed the experience of standing in front of his camera a little differently, as a long process in which Strand more or less seemed to ignore them, simply waiting for the moment when he felt they were ready, composed (or as some put it, bored – but they don’t look bored in the images.)

At the ‘One Law For All’ rally at Trafalgar Square on Saturday, against any introduction of Sharia law into the UK, the speakers were far from bored. It was an event where relatively little else was happening, and I was concentrating on them, photographing and trying to catch moments when expression or body-language seemed to speak to me.

The placards for the event provided some lively and relevant background. For once I worked without any flash fill, using fairly long focal lengths to give some differential focus. Here are a couple of the results – and there are a few more (evenincluding some of men, although it was an International Women’s Day event) on My London Diary, where you can also read more about the event.

And sometimes I take one that isn’t bad – like this picture of Tariq Ali in Trafalgar Square a few years ago:

Police Evidence Incriminates Police

For some years now, photographers – myself included – having been complaining about the high level of surveillance by police of us while we are doing our job at demonstrations. I’ve been videoed and photographed at almost every such event I’ve attended, often in a way that I think can only be intended as deliberate harassment. There must be thousands of images of me now on the police files, along with hours of video footage.

Yet all that time I’ve been behaving perfectly legally, following the instructions of police even when I’ve thought them unreasonable. The police have always denied that they paid special attention to journalists, but today on the Guardian Online site you can see a video which includes footage (video and sound commentary) from a police unit covering the Climate Camp at Kingsnorth which clearly shows how they targetted press photographers and videographers covering the event as well as the campaigners.

The Guardian report is by Paul Lewis, Marc Vallée and John Domokos, and Marc is one of the photographers targetted, along with videographer Jason N Parkinson. I was filmed and photographed by police on the Sunday when protesters marched from Rochester to Kingsnorth, although the surveillance then was considerably more low-key, but missed the rest of the week as I had to be in Glasgow, otherwise I would have been there too. As well as Marc and Jason, several other photographers I regularly work alongside also appear in the clip.

It’s long been very clear that the police target journalists who cover protest – despite their protestations of denial. Now we have it clearly in their own words and images from an operational level.

Emma Livingston in PDN’s top 30

I’ve often dissed the annual PDN top 30 as being geographically restricted – a very New York view of photography – although they do get nominations from people outside the city boundary, even from outside the USA, of photographers from around the world. Their 30, selected from 300 nominations is bound to include a number of the most promising photographers around, and has turned up some great names in past years, along with some others who have deservedly never been heard of since.

This year only about half of the photographers were born in the US, although quite a few of the others now live and work there. None of them was born in the UK, and I think the only British photographer is Emma Livingston, who I met in Paris last year – she was born there but currently lives in Argentina. She was working in a London gallery in 2003 when she decided to concentrate on photography.

You can see this year’s choice of “New and Emerging Photographes to Watch” here, and it’s worth wading through, looking at the portfolios, interviews and also photographers web sites. I’ll perhaps write more on some of them later.